think about it: it presumes hunters KNOW what they’re aiming at is a real cryptid rather than a hoaxer.

again, despite the redneck stereotype, most hunters i’ve encountered err on the side of caution. does that mean there aren’t trigger-happy types out there willing to squeeze off a round?

nope. but hey, folks are being shot in LA right now by a sniper(s), so obviously, it’s not only cryptids that are in any unbalanced person’s crosshairs!

That’s not Frame 352! Looks like Frame 353 or 354!

(The real Patty, I mean. And maybe a better frame, if not so “iconic.”)

As to Matt Bille’s “(It could also, of course, get the perpetrator shot, and it’s surprising that’s never happened.)”

Indeed. It’s also “surprising” that “no one’s shot one,” or that “no one’s hit one with a car,” or that “no hunters encounter them, or someone WOULD have shot one.” In fact, all those things, if you believe reports, HAVE happened - hunter encounters, for one, are the most frequent kind, if you take my informal survey - and they don’t stretch credulity any more than no one faking in a suit EVER getting hit, or shot. And contrary to what seems popular belief, there is considerable incentive - just read the reports - for folks NOT to want to be the one “making the zoological discovery of the century.”

And why couldn’t it have happened that one or two guys in suits HAVE gone missing, and for obvious reasons never told anyone what they were going out to do, and so no one ever knew why they went missing, and the guy that shot them went HO-ly…, and just shoveled, prayed and shut up, and they just wound up in missing-person reports, unsolved…?

All I mean to say is: we don’t know it NEVER happened.

I’m glad our Kind Host included photos of Patterson’s bigfoot and a Phillip Morris gorilla suit. In Greg Long’s THE MAKING OF BIGFOOT, Morris makes the claim that he immediately knew he was looking at one of his costumes when he first saw the Patterson film. (He claimed he sold Patterson one of his gorilla suits). Morris claimed that Patterson altered the suit’s face. Bigfoot advocates have taken this revelation to task, arguing that the entity in Patterson’s film is no man in mere gorilla costume.

I agree, to a point. I think Patterson modified a gorilla costume. He had to, for instance, to create the breasts Roe claimed to have seen. It looks to me that Patterson girdled his suit with a short hair body belt (the fellow who claims to be the one in the suit says Patterson told him he used horse hair and hide to construct the costume).

Enough of Morris’ costume survived in the making of the suit for him to recognize his own product. Maybe it is in the eye of the beholder, but if we compare the photos of the Patterson animal with the photo of Morris’ gorilla costume presented above, I, for one, see the same (if not literally) “sagittal crest” and shoulder and arm hair in both shots.

As a side issue, I wonder if Fort’s notion of a “Wipe” is not itself a Wipe. Mundane explanations for alleged paranormal events are dismissed out of hand using the Wipe Wipe.

Sooner or later it will happen MattBille. Then maybe those that are fools enough to do such stupid things might get the point.